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Is NCLB an "unfunded mandate"?
Education and political circles are buzzing with talk of the unfair burdens that Congress has allegedly heaped upon states and districts via the No Child Left Behind Act.
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LA in-confidence
This week, California Education Secretary Richard Riordan introduced a plan that would cede control over a school's administration and budget to its principal, taking it away from the central office administration. A hearty thumbs-up for this fine proposal, but now we learn that some principals would just as soon have the buck stop with someone else.
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Utah nicks, not nixes, NCLB
Last week, we reported that the Utah House Education Committee sent a bill to the floor barring state schools from "any further participation in the No Child Left Behind Act." (See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=133#1656 for background info.) Now it seems that legislators have decided that, while they
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Organizational Improvement and Accountability: Lessons for Education from Other Sectors
Brian Stecher and Sheila Nataraj Kirby, editorsRAND Education2004
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Resisting the Tyranny of the Exception
Over the course of the past several years, education policy makers have increasingly looked to non-traditional education reforms as means both of correcting traditional public education inequities and of improving the state of education overall. In Florida, one of the first states to implement statewide accountability and reform measures, the results have been encouraging.
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Self-serving civics lesson
We're all for civics in our schools but this version is outrageous. Next week, schools in the two big districts in the Maryland suburbs of D.C., Montgomery and Prince George's counties, will close two hours early so their students and teachers can attend a rally in the state capital to protest planned cuts in the state education budget.
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Georgia's new standards are peachy
The Georgia Performance Standards, the new curriculum proposed by the Department of Education for the public schools of Georgia, is a giant step forward for students and teachers in the Peachtree State.
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Hard looks at NCLB
Two articles put us in mind of the old but trusty clich??, it's all about the kids. In the Washington Post, Bruce Fuller of UC-Berkeley offers a few suggestions for fixes to No Child Left Behind, some of which strike us as sensible.
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Is Utah leaving NCLB Behind?
Since the adoption of No Child Left Behind two years ago, several states have threatened to reject federal Title I money so they can sidestep the new law's accountability provisions.
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Accountability & Testing, Standards
Grading the Systems: The guide to state standards, tests, and accountability policies
Co-published by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and AccountabilityWorks, with support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, this report looks at six elements of K-12 accountability systems in 30 different states. Each state is rated on standards, test content, alignment of tests to standards, test rigor, testing trustworthiness and openness, and accountability policies. The major conclusion: while some states have the basis of a sophisticated and rigorous accountability system in place, no state has every element of a serious standards-based education reform package in place. And few states are as open to evaluation as they ought to be.
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Assessing California's Charter Schools
Elizabeth G. Hill, Legislative Analyst???s OfficeJanuary 2004
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Callow college students?
The poet Longfellow once wrote, "How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams with its illusions, aspirations, dreams!" And though George Bernard Shaw would respond that youth is wasted on the young, youthful idealism remains a mainstay of our culture and one of the most precious things to be guarded and nurtured by education.
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Looking for that Zelman brief?
The Institute for Justice has a nifty new website on school choice with links to legal briefs, fact sheets, and talking points about the topic. A handy resource for researchers, journalists, and activists. Check it out at http://www.ij.org/cases/school/.
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MCAS passed by Mass. supremes
Though testing opponents have made some gains in the court of public opinion, they continue to strike out in the real courts. This week, the Massachusetts Supreme Court unanimously rejected a claim by several Bay State students that the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System is unconstitutional.
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And war is peace&.
There are at least three possible responses to pressure on teachers to get students up to par on state standardized tests. One is to do the job. Another is to take a pass, not get the job done, and criticize the test. A third is to cheat. Generally, we would characterize these responses, respectively, as the correct response, passing the buck, and unethical.
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A Tale of Two States
Education leaders in Georgia and Minnesota are working to revise their state standards for U.S. and world history. And, in both states, a fierce debate has ensued.
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Why must college be so costly?
Sixteen long years ago, I wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education that "consumers need a 'no-frills university' to turn the higher-education marketplace upside down." I lamented, "It costs $20,000 to attend some of the nation's more illustrious colleges this year, prices having risen an average of 9 percent over last year.
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Advanced Education
2004 Thomas B. Fordham Prizes for Excellence in Education
This brochure contains profiles of the winners of the second annual Thomas B. Fordham Foundation Prizes for Excellence in Education. The 2004 prize for Valor is awarded to Howard Fuller, and the 2004 prize for Distinguished Scholarship is awarded to Eric Hanushek.
Commentary
This just in&
On Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday, Gary Orfield and the Harvard Civil Rights Project released a study concluding--just like last year's report, and the one the year before that--that school segregation is on the rise. According to the authors, their 'new' work "shows that U.S. schools are becoming more segregated in all regions for both African American and Latino students.
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Jump-Starting the Charter School Movement: A Guide for Donors
The Philanthropy RoundtableJanuary 2004
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Evaluation of the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program
Kim K. Metcalf, Stephen D. West, Natalie A. Legan, Kelli M. Paul and William J. BooneIndiana University School of EducationDecember 2003
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Political Education: National Policy Comes of Age
Christopher T. Cross, Teachers College PressDecember 2003
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No stability, please, we're a union
A Missouri circuit court judge last week ruled that a Cass County school district violated state law when it awarded "commitment" bonuses to a handful of teachers who agreed to sign two-year contracts.
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Role model, indeed
Ahh, young love. It makes the world go round, no? And faking it may also cost Randi Coy, a 23-year-old teacher in Arizona, her job. Coy is the star of the new Fox reality show, "My Big, Fat, Obnoxious Fianc??," in which she has to convince her family and friends that she is engaged to a, well, big, fat, obnoxious man. If she does, she's promised a million dollars.
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Deconstructing the urban NAEP results
In the effort to reform American education, big-city school systems are where the action is. But remarkably, until now nobody could answer with a modicum of reliability a rock-bottom question: How are students faring academically in Los Angeles relative to those in Atlanta? There just wasn't enough information to make those kinds of city-to-city comparisons.
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K-12 progress in Iraq
A counterpoint to the doom and gloom surrounding most accounts of the rebuilding of Iraq. The Hoover Institution's Bill Evers, who for five months was part of the small team of U.S.
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The year of the teacher?
2004 could turn out to be the year of the teacher, the year that the bureaucratic, ideological, and regulatory strangleholds under which the teaching profession labors might just be broken. Last year ended with the Education Trust's stern rebuke of federal and state officials for playing fast and loose with NCLB's highly-qualified teacher requirement.
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Voucher day!
Today is a red-letter day for parents and kids trapped in failing D.C. public schools. The Senate has just passed the much-delayed omnibus spending bill for fiscal year 2004, which has language attached to it authorizing a voucher program in the District.